Rancho Los Cerritos

Before we left for Texas, I wrote about Juan Temple. I mentioned that the headquarters for his cattle ranch was located at the Rancho Los Cerritos, a spot on the land he bought from his wife's family, the Corta, and it stretched from the adobe down to the beach.

I was surprised that this piece of California history was literally up the street from us:

I tried to include the beach in the picture so you can get a feeling for how much space the cattle had to roam.

We went and visited the museum today. After a summer spent in Europe looking at historical artifacts and learning about how the culture in the vicinity of those former fortresses and palaces developed, it was nice to drive up the street for a few minutes and do the same for my own neighborhood.

An approaching shot

I read a few sentences about how the land made it into the hands of the Spanish: Cortez signed a land grant of 300,000 acres (nearly 470 sq. mi) to one of his soldiers, Nieto. I'm sure this happened often, frankly, but this was from the land grant I live on, so...

Nieto, in turn, signed a land grant over to one of his men, Corta, and within a few hundred years, one of the Corta daughters married a white man from Massachusetts, and sold him a piece of their land grant, in the southern portion, down by the beach.

Anyway, off a quick left turn and nearly immediate right, you drive onto Virginia Ave. A few blocks later you're passing gthe country club, and then there's a parking lot for the Rancho Los Cerritos.

After checking in at the visitor's center, and making a donation (if you feel like it, since it's a free attraction when open), you're free to explore the grounds.

The green gate from the approaching shot in the beginning of this post opens onto the courtyard of a large, rectilinear U-shaped adobe building. The central courtyard has a cute pond and fountain in the very center of it:

The down-leg to the right of the central courtyard has many doors that open with rooms behind that are in varying levels of explorable.

The first room was the mayordomo's room. Since Juan Temple lived mostly in Los Angeles proper and spent only a few weeks a year down at the RLC, the boss of the ranch while he was not present was the mayordomo, and this was his quarters:

We all liked how the chandelier had candles and a rope and pulley system.

The next few rooms we visited I snapped pictures of, and included them here.

Blacksmith Room

Laundry Room

Library

The library was in the main house, the top/bottom of the big rectangular U-shape, as was the parlor and dining room areas. It had an upstairs, but it was closed today due to issues with the flooring.

Main House Portion; Parlor (Living Room)

Main House Portion; Dining Room

Out and around the back had a large grassy area as well as various fruit trees, and way out back was a brick wall and ornate green metal gate. 

On the other side of that wall and gate was tghe country club's parking lot. It was a little jarring.

The backyard also saw the large second level's veranda:

The large adobe structure, the U-shape, was originally built in 1846 after Temple bought the land and wanted a place to keep as a headquarters for the ranch. After he passed away, it was bought in the 1860s by a Mr. Bixby, a name that appears all over the city today. It was lived in as he ranched sheep until the early 1900s, when it fell into disrepair. 

As immigration to California from Mexico grew, the RLC was rented out room by room to families and singletons, many were workers on the nearby ranches.

Eventually it was brought into the modern era with the addition of electricity and running water. Later still it was designated a historical site and turned into a learning center and museum. Cass had already been on a field trip, and he was our docent for the trip.

Below, you can see Cass standing, for scale, in the roots of a massive magnolia tree:

I can't imagien how old it must have been. Hundreds of years at least, I'd wager.

In the way back area off to one of the sides in the backyard were some earthenware ovens and cookers:

An early cistern remained in the way back, a rainwater catch for the irrigation system in the back for the food they grew:

It was a neat little walk through a slice of history, one much closer to home than the old walls, castles, hotels and eateries we visited earlier in the summer.

Not quite predating photography:

Is that...is that a magnolia?

Anyway, again local history provides wonder and entertainment.

Farm, 2026

Here we go...

We got back from our trip to the panhandle of Texas a couple days ago. It was, like all the summer trips we make to the Harrison Farm, a hot and sweaty affair. They are full of bugs of many kinds, often in the house (this year I was calling it a "mothpocalyspe"), as well as full of love. All of Corrie's siblings made it, save for her older brother Rob, but it was a great time. Michael, Corrie's sister's husband, and I catered a few days of events as well.

Getting there is always part of our adventure, and this year proved no different. For an hour, maybe, driving through Arizona, the following storm was visible from the road:

Looks crazy!

Then I had to drive through it.

That was less fun. More white-knuckle, 30 mph putt-puttering through near zero visibility and trying to limit the hydroplaning. But still, we made it to Gallup, and our hotel of choice in that great rez metropolis, the El Rancho, hotel to the Hollywood stars of the great Westerns era:

An exterior shot of the premises; cute

We even hit 100k miles in Corrie's Subaru:

And...we took Picasso, our cat. He enjoyed being a farm cat, as he always does.

We let him roam during the day most days early in the trip, but leaving the door open late into the night with alight on proved a bad idea, what with the moths, mosquitoes, hornets, and wasps.

The sunsets to the west are usually incredible, but this. year we were limited because of clouds...but not every day:

Picasso loved that window, paying special attention in the pre-seven am hours and sleeping later once it got hot:

Another day, another window sill nap

The grainery in Clarendon is the biggest building in the town, and can be spotted early on the road to town, and easily from most spots, even the parking lot to the Lowes/Ace Hardware grocery store/hardware store in town:

The farm pickup truck, Old Blue, seems to have been driven to this spot a few, er, seasons ago and hasn't moved since. Gas or battery issues, I guess:

The Farm is a place where the work never ends. It's a vacation, yes, but not in the sense of "let's go to the beach and relax with mai-tais all day." It's more like a transportation back to the nineteenth century. You have a building to sleep in, sure, but you're kinda at the mercy of the elements. It's relentlessly hot, and occasionally inside the kitchen is the hottest place. With all the work that needs to happen, and the spotty wi-fi, you find yourself using your phone less and less, hence the above collection may exhaust my "nice" pictures from the trip. I wasn't snapping pictures away, but I'm not the best for that enterprise anyway.

This iteration of the Harrison/Dolman Reunion was held at a school in Hedley, Texas. The school was a high school basketball powerhouse in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '90s and early aughts. It's crazy. Corrie's brother Pete and I examined the extensive trophy cabinet one afternoon. 

This is the first year that there won't be any high school students, as the space will accommodate only K-6 and still have less than 200 students.

Cass, Uncle Joey and I shot hoops for a while in the darkened gym until we were yelled at. Michael and I made burgers in their awesome school kitchen, as professional a kitchen as either of have worked in in decades. Pete, Michael, Joey, and I made a brisket in Pete's fancy new digital smoker, and it was fantastic.

One day in particular I felt like I should write about. A day begins at 12 midnight. On this particular day, around 12:30 am, two large projects were started simultaneously: the brisket clean up and marination start; and the pottery glaze mixing.

Corrie's dad, Ron, kept a watchful eye on me and my carving of the raw briskets, taking just the right amount of fat off, and then preparing the correct marinade. That sentence, while easy to type, in real life took at least an hour. Once the meat was trimmed properly, washed, placed into the tough bag inside the cooler, the marinade was prepared. Once it gets put into the bag and onto the meat, the massage starts, the bag gets tied, and the ice goes in. Now every few hours until it goes into the smoker it needs to be massaged and flipped.

At the same time Ron and I were starting the meat, Corrie started sifting one of the two fifteen-pound bags of glaze into one of the five-gallon buckets mostly full of water. The sifting takes time, and I even spelled her with the second fifteen-pound bag and second five-gallon bucket of water.

In the past I've talked about scientific magic (photography, baby!), and I thonk I'd like to return to this topic later, but ceramic pottery should qualify as well. You take clay...sometimes it's just mud from clay-y soil (Dan and Citrus Heights maybe?), let the mud settle, pour off the water after long enough and you have clay. Great. Once you form the clay into a shape (a cup or bowl, or watever) you can bake it really hot (over 1000F). Then you call it a bisque, and once you dip it into a liquid concoction of powdered metals and bake it again even hotter, what you get is a thing that is durable and awesome, a glass-type surface on a heavy duty, warmth-trapping core.

Anyway, That night I trimmed and then marinated the brisket, Corrie and I mixed up glaze, and then we fired up a whole set of greenware. "Greenware" is what the dried clay bowls are called before they're fired into bisques. You have to 'bisque' the greenware before you can even use the glaze. The firings in the kiln take between eight and ten hours to bisque a thing, and at least another six to eight to cool enough to handle. That night, we fired greenware into bisques that we'd need to glaze and fire into finished pottery, and have cool enough by the Saturday auction. The pieces were auctioned off to raise money for the Farm.

Above is the kiln, red hot inside, about 1400 degrees F, on the start of the cool down mode. This was later on the day I was talking about. Between the brisket, the glaze sifting, and the greenware firing, we didn't get to bed until after 3am. After I woke up and made some breakfast, I headed to check the kiln and got that picture. That was a Wednesday, when everyone would be arriving. Peter and his son Colton made it around 7pm, which was after Carol's return near dinnertime, while Stephanie, Michael, and their son Miles arrived from Austin closer to 9pm.

It was a long day, prefaced by things that had to get done. The brisket had to marinate for at least as long as we did before starting the smoker Friday afternoon (to be ready the next afternoon). The bisques had to be done so they could be glazed by grandkids before getting their firings even later.

Stuff always has to get done.

And Corrie's designing and trying to manage the construction of Ron and Carol's new digs onsite, which adds a nifty wrinkle to the whole endeavor. (It's looking freaking awesome, by the by.)

The times were good, the days long, the devices mostly stowed, and the feeling of accomplishment you get because you're doing something was ever present. That's what I generally fail to imaprt on people I talk to about the Farm trips. It takes twenty hours and we usually bring our cat. It's hot and there are too many bugs and goddamn-bastard-fucking stickers that are terrible, but you get shit done. Every day. Stuff gets done, and it's peaceful. And that's one reason we love it out there.

And when that house gets done...? It's going to be AWESOME!